Welcome to the United Socialist States of America where “digital book burning” and book banning are suddenly acceptable, where Dr. Seuss has been canceled, and where books that question “transgenderism,” the legitimacy of “critical race theory,” “cancel culture,” or the bogus 1619 project are censored and banned.

Is this the free country that I grew up in? Is this the Republic for which I served four years as a member of the U.S. Army? Is this the nation where freedom of speech and independent thought was once the infrangible anchor of our existence? Is this the Republic created by men and women who fought and died so we could live in a land free of despotism, tyranny, and yes, censorship?

I always thought it was, but today I am not so sure.

When a nation begins banning books for any reason, that nation is hurtling headfirst toward the abyss of suppression. But most important, it means the freedom of expression and speech that Americans have always cherished is in grave danger.

Ever since books have been printed and distributed, there have been groups of people eager to set fire to them, ban them, and generally make sure certain titles (and the ideas contained in them) never see the light of day.

In the 1930s, book burnings were a regular occurrence in universities throughout Nazi Germany. Brainwashed students burned titles they deemed “Un-German” or subversive.

Now, it looks like digital book burning and book-banning have arrived in America.

Amazon, which sells anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all physical books in the U.S., has been erasing, canceling, and banning hundreds and most likely thousands of books consistently—mostly by authors that do not fit a leftist or socialist ideological mold.

Recently, a book related to transgenderism that disputed Amazon’s position on the issue was removed, exposing Amazon’s Orwellian contrivance for banning books. Other books that contest critical race theory or criticize the left’s socialist platforms such as the Green New Deal, open borders, or the Democrats HR-1 voting bill which in essence will allow illegal aliens to vote in national elections, are being removed from Amazon’s digital and physical shelves.

The book challenging transgenderism was Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.  Amazon’s removal of the book means that, in addition to not providing the e-book or audiobook, other booksellers on the platform are also banned from selling it.

“We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech,” Amazon said in a recent statement.

Okay, but who defines “hate speech?” Who do you think? It’s the obsequious toadies at Amazon.

The American Civil Liberties Union, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, says there is no such thing as “hate speech.”

“One person’s hate speech is another person’s free speech,” the ACLU says.

Clearly, Amazon is not listening.

If disagreeing with and challenging a flawed and racist hypothesis called critical race theory is hate speech, then the First Amendment is indeed on its last legs.

Until about a decade ago, it was considered a mainstay of Western and American rule of law to allow free speech–including books. Now, within just one or two generations of the introduction of critical race theory in American schools and universities, leftists  and even some RINOs now denounce those who disagree with CRT as “domestic terrorists.”

Amazon likely shares the same views, so it is not a stretch, then, to believe that all books from such dissenting voices will soon be labeled hate speech and their authors, domestic terrorists.

Enigmatically, you can still order Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on Amazon Prime for single-day shipping. So, “Mein Kampf”–the book containing the ideology that began the Holocaust and WWII–is acceptable, but a critique of transgenderism that disagrees with Amazon’s unempirical opinions on the matter is not?

Does that make sense?

Not to me, it doesn’t. But I am one of those who feel “Mein Kampf” should be available to anyone who wants to read it, just as Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” or Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” should.

Allowing the free-flow of thought and information is NOT DANGEROUS, as Amazon, Big Tech, and some in our leftist media seem to believe.

Censorship achieves nothing. It drives banned political discourse and thought underground where it can fester and someday erupt. It is essential that books like “Mein Kampf” or “Das Kapital” are freely available so people can learn from history rather than fall back into the totalitarian snare into which Amazon and the other Big Tech cartels have plunged.

Now that the “woke” left has even succeeded in canceling Dr. Seuss and banning several of his popular children’s books, I wonder what’s next.

Perhaps the Biden administration and its socialist sycophants will promote physical book burnings on the South Lawn of the White House or at the foot of the Washington Monument.

Maybe the leftists and their socialist cronies will succeed in creating “secret offices” within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security whose job it will be to root out “political enemies” of the state, otherwise known as Republicans and anybody else who voted for or supported Donald Trump.

These new secret police entities would conduct intelligence missions and investigations to sniff out extremists and radicals in our midst.

Sound familiar? The ruling Nazi party in Germany created a similar government entity. It was called the Geheime Staatspolizei more commonly known as the GESTAPO. When it was turned loose, the GESTAPO rounded up all of the ruling party’s opponents (communists, social democrats, and vocal adversaries) and stuck them in concentration camps.

When you hear Democrats in Congress and the mainstream media talking about “de-programing” Republicans, conservatives, and Trump followers, it calls to mind the “re-education camps” set up by the conquering North Vietnamese Communists in which thousands of former South Vietnamese military and government officials were tortured and worked to death.

These tyrannical and despotic ideas are nothing more than the ingredients of a noxious political stew the Biden administration and its socialist toadies are concocting.

First, you ban books that don’t follow leftist dogma. Then you censor and prohibit conservative thought and expression and finally, you round up and arrest political opponents on the pretext that they are “dangerous” to the state.

All I can say is thank God for the Second Amendment and for the framers who were wise enough to see the need for it when they ratified our Constitution 233 years ago.

They knew that totalitarian governments and the tyrants who lead them are always a danger, but giving citizens the freedom and resources to defend themselves against oppression is critical to the survival of our Republic.